TPM: On The Edge of Truth Last night, cable news personalities could not bring themselves to say Paul Ryan lied in his RNC speech.

“I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “I’m sure they will.” Oh, those irrepressible fact-checkers, always caring about the difference between true and false – unlike the oh-so-serious journalists on CNN.

WaPo’s James Downie: “With tonight’s speech, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have doubled down on their twin bets of 2012 — that journalists will sit back and name winners and losers without regard to who is telling the truth, and that voters are too ignorant to care about the truth. Do not let them be right.”

The gamble the Romney campaign has made throughout this campaign, and most obviously in this year’s Republican National Convention, is that the truth no longer matters, and that facts are irrelevant to the voting process. There’s probably less risk to that gamble than one might think.

UPDATE: Ryan was only a warm-up act for tonight’s festival of lies. Think Progress notes: Romney has led a post-truth campaign. A top adviser even admitted earlier this week, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Four years ago our economy was on the verge of collapse, thanks to the Bush administration’s malfeasance. Four years ago the bulk of our ground forces were tied down trying unsuccessfully to occupy Iraq. Four years ago America’s international reputation was in the dumpster.

While Obama’s auto task force was working on the automaker’s prepackaged bankruptcy, Ryan called Rattner, who headed the team, to lobby on behalf of the Janesville plant, Rattner said yesterday in a telephone interview.

“We don’t get involved in those decisions,” Rattner said. “There was no desire to go punish the people of Wisconsin or Janesville. It was simply: Plants were closed all over the country and Janesville was one of them.”

In other words, for political reasons Rep. Ryan wanted the federal government to intervene in a GM business decision.

I feel very strongly that this statement from a fact checker really needs to be fact-checked.

An outside group supporting Mr. Obama ran an advertisement giving the unfair impression that Mr. Romney was responsible for the death of the wife of a steelworker who lost his job and his health insurance when Mr. Romney’s old company, Bain Capital, closed down the plant where he worked.

You see here’s my problem.

IF the man lost his job and not only his health insurance but his very ability to pay the premiums on a replacement policy due to Bain Capital loading his company with debt and then selling off whatever they could before leaving the pension plans bankrupt: why isn’t it the director of Bain Capital’s Fault?

I believe strongly that when you precipitate an action such a closing a plant and devastating people’s lives then you have to “Man up” and take responsibility for what happens to the people whom you deprived of jobs and insurance.

What they did was perfectly legal if morally unjustifiable.

But you cannot say that the advertisement is not true for it surely is.

These people and their hate. I know things were bad in 2008 but it just feels like they’ve had 4 years to get madder and go crazier. I find their neediness exhausting, And the Dems have allowed themselves to be pulled right-ward with their ‘bipartisan’ ‘I’ll be your baby tonite’ victimisation crap.

This year is like that place you come to in the middle of Kansas when you are driving cross country. One fork in the road leads to a super highway into Missouri. The other fork is a bumpy fresh cut road into Missouri. Looks fine anyway you go until you get over the border into Missouri and the super highway you found takes a sharp turn south and dumps everyone into the waters off the Cayman Islands without a paddle. While the other fork ambles towards Canada.

I guess my point is that all of these accusations of deceit are not born in any sanitized, purely objective truthiness. There is at the heart of all the spin – Objective fact! And that there are so many calling Ryan on his ‘brush with the truth’, it may very possibly be that the kernal of truth in all this spin is directed at calling out the socipathic for what it is.

Did he, or did he not claim to have run a marathon in under three hours? Yes or no. Was the factory in question closed during the Bush administration? Yes or no.

This, despite any suggestion that President Obama may himself be somewhat truth-impaired is the question regarding Paul Ryan.

He never said that that the factory closed under Obama. He never blamed Obama for the factory closing. So there was no lie.

What the point of that part of the speech was that Obama is an idiot for promising that the plant wouldn’t close. As a candidate Obama said that if the auto bailout went through, then the plant wouldn’t be closed. The bailout did go through and it was closed anyway. The plant was also making cars through April 2009. Also, when the government did take over GM the Janesville plant was on standby status and could have started producing again, as other plants on standby status did.

Candidate Obama spoke at the Janesville plant in February 2008. Ryan’s claim:

“Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years,’ That’s what he said in 2008,” Ryan said at the Republican National Convention last week. “Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

The plant stopped production on Dec. 23, 2008, according to an Associated Press report. The report noted that “about 50” workers remained at the plant until May or June 2009 to complete outstanding orders.

So, if we’re going to get all Clintonian with what was said:
(1) In 2008 candidate Obama stated a belief, without promising anything.
(2) Rep. Ryan might or might not be wrong about how long the plant lasted, depending on what date you use for the closing.

The part I find interesting is where right-wing Republicans criticize President Obama for not being sufficiently socialist in his policies. Rep. Ryan begged the government to re-open the plant. Does that make sense to anyone?

Except that the market for SUVs was such that re-opening the plant would have been a mistake, according to GM management. You and Ryan are saying that the U.S. government ought to have gone against the market, a losing proposition that might have hampered GM’s comeback.

GM decided to close the plant in December 2008, following an economic collapse and near-depression brought about by Republican policy blunders (that Rep. Ryan voted for). The plant was already experiencing layoffs in February 2008, when Obama said it could be kept open with government support, but its troubles were relatively minor at that point. Ryan actually requested government help to re-open the plant in the middle of a recession.

“The nature and timing of this case counsel caution in evaluating the validity of [Section] 2(B),” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy on behalf of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, noting that the law has not yet gone into effect. Because “[t]here is a basic uncertainty about what the law means and how it will be enforced,” the majority chose to allow the law to go forward, but made clear that “[t]his opinion does not foreclose other preemption and constitutional challenges to the law as interpreted and applied after it goes into effect.”

Voter ID has been ruled unconstitutional in Wisconsin and Texas. The judge in Pennsylvania used strained logic in order to claim their law was OK by the Constitution. It’s not.

Of all the textually guaranteed rights in the Constitution, “the right to vote” is mentioned most often — indeed, beginning in 1868, it has been reaffirmed no fewer than five times, in § 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, § 1 of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, § 1 of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, and § 1 of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.

It’s true that none of these provisions says, “Every citizen has a fundamental right to vote, and we ain’t playing with you when we say that.” Instead, they protect against specific grounds of abridgment. But no other right in the Constitution is spelled out that way either. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the “right to keep and bear arms” — these rights are also, in the same kind of language, assumed to exist and protected against state abridgment.